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MASTER OF THE CROSSROADS

A most impressive fusion of history and fiction, and easily the finest work of this still-young writer’s splendid career.

A magnum opus in the making continues with this second in a trilogy (after All Souls’ Rising, 1995) portraying the late–18th-century Haitian Revolution.

This huge middle volume concentrates on the years 1794–1801, though its narrative is framed by scenes in which “liberator” Toussaint L’Ouverture, later (1802) imprisoned in France, writes his “memoir” and looks back on his years of struggle. Bell offers masterfully detailed accounts of Toussaint’s shifting allegiances (once an ally of Spain, he has since declared himself a French “Republican” inspired by that country’s Revolution) and campaigns against British occupying troops, native rebels, and French aristocratic slave-owners. The figure of the liberator is most clearly shown in the image of him held by those he commands, encounters, or engages in battle—including his conflicted subordinates Riau and Maillart, his captive Dr. Antoine Hébert (a major figure in All Souls’ Rising), and involved “colonials” of various national and ethnic origins. Given the inevitable preponderance of somewhat redundant military operations, one admires—and appreciates—the ingenuity with which Bell varies the story’s content. The pervasiveness of miscegenation, for example, is seen to threaten marriages and reputations, while ruining innocent lives and, paradoxically, offering the stubbornly decent Hébert an unexpected chance at happiness. Powerful drama emerges in the complexities that bedevil the Arnaud sugar plantation (perhaps cursed by its mistress’s vicious murder of a pregnant slave); the wretched figure of half-breed Jean Michel Fortier, who betrays his heritage by becoming a slave-catcher; and the ingenuous “Moustique” (“mosquito”), a “baby priest” transfigured by his susceptibility to both the heavy rhythms of indigenous native religions and the insistent lure of the flesh. The tale climaxes memorably, with Toussaint triumphant, having destroyed or driven away his people’s tormentors—yet doomed to be overtaken by the well-known events that Bell dutifully provides for us in an appended Chronology of Historical Events and selected Original Letters and Documents.

A most impressive fusion of history and fiction, and easily the finest work of this still-young writer’s splendid career.

Pub Date: Oct. 1, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-42056-8

Page Count: 752

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2000

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THE MOST FUN WE EVER HAD

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet...

Four Chicago sisters anchor a sharp, sly family story of feminine guile and guilt.

Newcomer Lombardo brews all seven deadly sins into a fun and brimming tale of an unapologetically bougie couple and their unruly daughters. In the opening scene, Liza Sorenson, daughter No. 3, flirts with a groomsman at her sister’s wedding. “There’s four of you?” he asked. “What’s that like?” Her retort: “It’s a vast hormonal hellscape. A marathon of instability and hair products.” Thus begins a story bristling with a particular kind of female intel. When Wendy, the oldest, sets her sights on a mate, she “made sure she left her mark throughout his house—soy milk in the fridge, box of tampons under the sink, surreptitious spritzes of her Bulgari musk on the sheets.” Turbulent Wendy is the novel’s best character, exuding a delectable bratty-ness. The parents—Marilyn, all pluck and busy optimism, and David, a genial family doctor—strike their offspring as impossibly happy. Lombardo levels this vision by interspersing chapters of the Sorenson parents’ early lean times with chapters about their daughters’ wobbly forays into adulthood. The central story unfurls over a single event-choked year, begun by Wendy, who unlatches a closed adoption and springs on her family the boy her stuffy married sister, Violet, gave away 15 years earlier. (The sisters improbably kept David and Marilyn clueless with a phony study-abroad scheme.) Into this churn, Lombardo adds cancer, infidelity, a heart attack, another unplanned pregnancy, a stillbirth, and an office crush for David. Meanwhile, youngest daughter Grace perpetrates a whopper, and “every day the lie was growing like mold, furring her judgment.” The writing here is silky, if occasionally overwrought. Still, the deft touches—a neighborhood fundraiser for a Little Free Library, a Twilight character as erotic touchstone—delight. The class calibrations are divine even as the utter apolitical whiteness of the Sorenson world becomes hard to fathom.

Characters flip between bottomless self-regard and pitiless self-loathing while, as late as the second-to-last chapter, yet another pleasurable tendril of sisterly malice uncurls.

Pub Date: June 25, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-385-54425-2

Page Count: 544

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: March 3, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2019

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HOUSE OF LEAVES

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and...

An amazingly intricate and ambitious first novel - ten years in the making - that puts an engrossing new spin on the traditional haunted-house tale.

Texts within texts, preceded by intriguing introductory material and followed by 150 pages of appendices and related "documents" and photographs, tell the story of a mysterious old house in a Virginia suburb inhabited by esteemed photographer-filmmaker Will Navidson, his companion Karen Green (an ex-fashion model), and their young children Daisy and Chad.  The record of their experiences therein is preserved in Will's film The Davidson Record - which is the subject of an unpublished manuscript left behind by a (possibly insane) old man, Frank Zampano - which falls into the possession of Johnny Truant, a drifter who has survived an abusive childhood and the perverse possessiveness of his mad mother (who is institutionalized).  As Johnny reads Zampano's manuscript, he adds his own (autobiographical) annotations to the scholarly ones that already adorn and clutter the text (a trick perhaps influenced by David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest) - and begins experiencing panic attacks and episodes of disorientation that echo with ominous precision the content of Davidson's film (their house's interior proves, "impossibly," to be larger than its exterior; previously unnoticed doors and corridors extend inward inexplicably, and swallow up or traumatize all who dare to "explore" their recesses).  Danielewski skillfully manipulates the reader's expectations and fears, employing ingeniously skewed typography, and throwing out hints that the house's apparent malevolence may be related to the history of the Jamestown colony, or to Davidson's Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph of a dying Vietnamese child stalked by a waiting vulture.  Or, as "some critics [have suggested,] the house's mutations reflect the psychology of anyone who enters it."

The story's very ambiguity steadily feeds its mysteriousness and power, and Danielewski's mastery of postmodernist and cinema-derived rhetoric up the ante continuously, and stunningly.  One of the most impressive excursions into the supernatural in many a year.

Pub Date: March 6, 2000

ISBN: 0-375-70376-4

Page Count: 704

Publisher: Pantheon

Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2000

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